Random thoughts, musings, and tech stuff

28 May 2015, 00:09

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Setting the Stage - IO15 Keynote

We walked into a room with a wraparound display around three-quarters of the large room on the third floor of Moscone, that was showing a slick looking wallpaper with floating graphs, and ones and zeros. The wallpaper animation was interrupted for a few games of pong played from end to end on what must be a five hundred foot long display. From there, we saw a Rube Goldburg running on the screen, where they took advantage of the fact that it had been filmed, and took sections in slow motion. The music was building up to what we assumed would be a massive payoff, but then near the end, the screen filled with water, and a giant whale swam across the screen. More pong, and floating ones and zeros, and waiting for things to get started. The Pong finals ended in a tie. Now we’re flying through the galaxy, floating past asteroids that appear to be way too close together. Earth shows up and fades out to applause, then we are transitioned into a countdown that starts from 60, counts down to 7, at which point we see a reddit alien and twitter birds, uber cars in an animation that looks like it belongs as the intro to Silicon Valley. This part of the animation features a red dot in the starring role. I wonder how much 7-up paid for this promotional spot? The red dot fixes the countdown and then fireworks.

9:41am - Start Time

Sundar walks onto stage. He’s trying to weave a consistent story around all of Google’s core technologies. I’m not sure how true it is, but it makes for a nice story.

Quick rundown of platforms that we’ll be touching on:

Android

Android Wear

Android Auto

Android TV

Chromecast

Android M Developer Preview

HBO Now announced for Google Play, Silicon Valley gets a mention! Yay!

Android M Developer Preview

9:49am

App Permissions

Customize and control, app permissions. App permssions changing to the iOS paradigm, WhatsApp used. No permissions up front, first time use, microphone permissions comes up. Permissions may be revoked. Only applies to apps targeted at M. No auto-update blocking on new permissions. This is huge.

Mobile Web

Providing content in WebViews kind of sucks. Chrome Custom Tabs are the solution. Chrome browser running with branded UI features when linked from an app, creates a seamless experience. Pre-fetching content. Leverage all of Chrome’s goodies. Q3.

App Links

Verify that the app owns the links that it claims. No more disambiguation dialog, because the platform can verify those links.

Mobile Payments

Android Pay, what about Wallet? Works with any Android device with NFC. Works at any retailers that accept touchless payments (does that mean all Apple Pay providers?). Also in-app.

Simplicity

Security

Choice

KitKat forward.

Fingerprint Support

Built-in fingerprint support in Android M with a standard API. Works with Android Pay. Can be used to unlock, or do in-app purchases. Open APIs. Nexus 6 support???

Power & Charging

Smarter power management with Doze. Uses motion detection to exponentially back-off network activity to extend battery life on devices that are lightly used, or left on the table for most of th day. Still allows high-priority chat messages through. Up to 2x battery life on Nexus 9.

3-5x faster charging with USB C, which sounds like it’s going to be the new standard. Working with OEMs.

Word Selection

Word chunking in selection.

Easier sharing

Direct share, remembers who/what you share with most frequently to surface intelligently.

Always-on apps

Shopping list example, which is great, since I’ve hit this use case. Previous version kept the screen at full on brightness if you wanted your list up. Claim that it’s battery friendly, we’ll see.

Wrist gestures

Scroll through lists or Now Cards when hands are full, using gestures.

Emoji

Draw an emoji, get a list to pick from.

Uber

Uber is coming! “Call a car”, now can call an Uber, and watch the car coming with the always-on screen.

Fit

Can recognize squats, pushups and situps.

Spotify

Browse music on the watch.

Apps

4,000 specifically targeting Android Wear.

IoT/Brillo

10:15am

Sundar’s back on stage. Talking IoT/Home.

Want to connect everything.

Home

Smart blinds. Smart potted plant.

Agriculture

Smart Grass. Smart dirt.

Transportation

Smart bus drivers.

Problems

OEMs not sure how to build coherent platforms.

Nest

Division that’s going to solve this problem is Nest.

User Experience

Communications

Operating System

Brillo

10:17am

Operating system for IoT. I’m sure I’ll be saying that word a lot over the summer.

Derived from Android

Minimal system requirements

Broad silicon support

Easy to secure

Q3 Developer Preview

Weave

10:19am

Developer APIs

Cross Platform

Messaging layer for communicating between smart devices. Looks like JSON, though I’m sure it’s going to be a low-level binary format. Standardized schemas, custom schemas will be able to be submitted for approval.

Q4 2015 Full Stack.

Mobile Search and Google Now

10:22am

Natural Language Processing

Image Recognition

Translation

Machine Learning

Deep Neural Nets

10:23am

Word error rate from 23% -> 8%.

Google Now

More contextual. Why can’t your smartphone be smarter? Where did I park my car?

Context

Answers (proactively)

Action

Context

Different contexts means different information is useful. Being at Disney World vs sitting on your couch.

Understanding pronouns, through context awareness:

“It”

“There”

“That”

“They”

Answers

Knowledge graph. 1B entities in the knowledge graph.

Action

Get stuff done with apps. 100+ partners that surface actions from apps. Order an Uber. Play music. Re-order groceries.

Now on Tap

10:31am

Where you are, when you need it. Coming in Android M.

Long press the Home button, Google Now surfaces contextual information without leaving the app you’re looking at.

Viber getting demoed. Shows Google Now picking out two relevant pieces of information and providing actions based on those bits of info. NLP very good to pick out the dry cleaning reminder.

Google Now was able to correct mis-pronounciations based on what’s on the screen. This has been an issue, but the context helps the system correct the issue.

We need to provide actions for Now hooks to take advantage of.

Photos

10:38am

Machine learning. Trying to solve the issue of scrolling and scrolling to find what you’re looking for.

Google Photos

Launched for the 5th time? Looks like the old Photos.

Home

Home for all your photos and videos. To help organize and bring moments to life. Make it easy to share and save what matters.

Home for your photos. Auto-backup. Synced to Drive (instead of G+). Pinch across months/years. Looks a bit like iOS’s iPhoto (or whatever) feature. Swipe for collections. Seems very gesture heavy.

Organize

View people places and things. Sorted for you, privately. They’re Tweeting. G+ not very high up on the list.

For people, they’re able to look from the time his 5 year old was a baby, and they’re all categorized correctly. That’s impressive.

Search is also very impressive.

Actions

Editing, but also being able to easily put together stories, etc.

Photos Assistant. Auto-awesome v2. GoPro footage looks terrible.

Gesture for pressing and dragging to select similar to how desktops do it. “Get a link”, lets you create an album for anyone to consume without logging in. Allows you to add album to your library as the recipient.